In a recent Reality Check article, Software AG’s Paula Ziehr offers some candid thoughts on the acceptability of failure in enterprise-level IT. According to Ziehr, billions of dollars are being thrown away each year on failed IT projects. Ziehr discusses the idea that failure is an expected and accepted part of the culture in IT departments but argues that this shouldn’t be the case. For Ziehr, planning and vetting projects against their architecture landscape to identify potential sources of project failure would certainly reduce the opportunities to fail.

To that end, Integrated IT Portfolio Analysis (IIPA) is experiencing an increase in awareness as CIOs continue to recognize the symbiotic nature among Project Portfolios, Application Portfolios, Enterprise Architecture and IT Strategy Management. Similarly, FITARA, which just reached its one-year anniversary in December, enables CIOs even more so in their modernization efforts. Like IIPA, FITARA enables better planning for agency IT programs, helping to mitigate cost and expenditure.

T.I.M.E. – standing for tolerate, invest, migrate, and eliminate – enables government IT and corporate IT alike the ability to know about existing components and the projects they are engaged in across multiple areas in addition to how well those elements are performing.

Intelligence such as this is critical to an IT Modernization strategy where failure is not an option, and will never be an accepted standard.